Incumbent Democrats in the House did surprisingly well here and in Washington and Oregon. Rather than a wave, on the West Coast, it was more like a normal midterm correction.

Of course, the big West Coast win for the Democrats was Harry Reid, who kept his Nevada Senate seat in a close race against the Tea Party-backed Sharron Angle. (Nicholas Lemann wrote about how he did it.) Lizza predicted that he will keep his position as Majority Leader, but said that “trying to predict the dynamics of Senate caucus leadership battles is like trying to figure out who the next pope will be. It’s very difficult from the outside to understand where the votes are.”

Tom Perriello, one of the few Democrats who didn’t try to distance himself from the Obama Administration in his campaign, lost in Virginia. (George Packer has more on that.) But Lizza pointed out that, overall, candidates’ alignment with the President did not seem to determine their success.

Whether you voted against the stimulus, health-care reform, and cap and trade or voted for all three, you still lost if you were in a tough district. In 1994, there was a much tighter linkage between votes for the Clinton agenda and Dem losses.

And Coll drew attention to “the best-worst ad of the whole election”: a closing TV spot by Meg Whitman

where she stood before the camera and said she wanted make California just like it was when she moved here 30 years ago—when “anything was possible” or some such. What neither she nor her staff noted was that the governor of California 30 years ago was JERRY BROWN. The Brown campaign closed with its opponent endorsing him!

You can watch, below, how Brown pounced on her mistake.

As for who to watch in thirty, or even two, years, Coll says the left doesn’t have much to offer. “There aren’t many new Democratic members. The Tea Party winners will be the ones to watch.”